Psychedelic Brass Bands and Missing Links

I’ve never got on well with Pink Floyd’s song Atom Heart Mother. Brass bands and psychedelic rock are distantly related musical cousins. Brass tends to present a hard, angular, pragmatic sound, completely at odds with the soft edges favoured by space cadets. And on the evidence of Atom Heart Mother, they mix about as well as oil and water. The brass arrives like an uninvited party guest, and parps and farts to no discernible purpose. To these ears, it sounds like it doesn’t belong there. Still, they tried, so full marks for effort.

Recognising their wrong turn, the band wisely banished the brass, and began to refine what would become their signature sound, a languid music of refined, understated power. Take a trip to Cambridge and follow the River Cam, as it meanders through the gentle furrows of Grantchester Meadows. There are echoes of natural themes throughout their work, and it’s no coincidence that their best music has always worked well outdoors.

But hang on a minute. Fast forward four decades and we stumble across a song called Heavenly Waters by British Sea Power. It’s got a brass band all over it, but seems to be trading on the thrill of Floyd’s Us and Them. The understated power is present and correct, and yet the brass doesn’t jar or stick out. It melds seamlessly to create a new and glorious whole. It’s a more fully realised version of what Atom Heart Mother could have been. Should have been. A missing link, if you like, an update on an inchoate vision.

So, brass bands and psychedelia: heaven or hell? And what other songs have you heard that suggest a much improved version of other bands’ earlier works in progress?

(The best version of Heavenly Waters is on British Sea Power’s ‘Sea of Brass’ album. It’s not available on Youtube, but for those with Spotify, check out the link below).

I listened to the song again this morning before posting, and I enjoyed it more than I remembered – I love the Popol Vuh-like choral section. Lots of hints of what was to come later, on Meddle and beyond. But the brass still jars for me. It just doesn’t – or can’t – create the right kind of mood. I wonder why they put it on there in the first place.

Because experimentation. Because trying something different. It was a brilliant move for them. Live, sans horns, it just didn’t sound right. Some time after its release they (especially Waters) started regretting it, and I’m pretty sure that’s when the fans started turning against it too. When it came out, it was seen as a progression from the studio sides of Ummagumma, which had been mostly a disappointment. Everybody played the live sides of that album, but at least half of the studio tracks went ignored. So Atom Heart made a real impact – a full, proper Floyd studio album, and a real trip to listen to. You could skin up, lie back (usually on the floor of Phil Croskin’s front room – his mother – my first MILF – was completely cool about joints) and float away for that side-long journey. I don’t think any of us questioned the horn parts – or any other. It was the new Floyd album, for fuck’s sake – a beautiful ritual, something to help you get out of your head. And the tracks on the other side were gorgeous, too – that pastoral English vibe. I can’t remember anyone not liking it at the time. That came later, when people got all snooty about “pretentiousness”, but not for me. For a long time now, I’ve listened to it with Biding My Time edited in before Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast. It’s a little out of whack chronologically but fits better there than anywhere else.

Atom Heart may be “artistically flawed” (whatever) but I love it more than Dark Side and everything that came after that. It’s a brave, beautiful thing.

I know you love this album, because it’s been discussed before, including Norman Smith’s production, which, on my vinyl copy, always sounded a bit thin -especially compared to the much fuller sounding Meddle.

I’m too young to have experienced it on release, so I’m coming at it from a slightly different perspective. I love Side Two, and Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast is one of my favourite Floyd tracks. The sound effects and stereo panning are mesmerising. Listening to the album again this morning, you can see how it had a huge influence on bands like The Orb and FSOL.

But Side One still seems like work in progress, a collage of disparate ideas looking for a theme. The leap from AHM to Meddle seems huge. Echoes is epic – and their peak, for me.

I’m with you. I live AHM from the cover in. And I love the brass, purely because it’s so weird having it there, as opposed to on Beatles tracks which often sound a bit rumpty tumpty anyway and the brass makes it worse. With the Floyd it sounds quite deranged and scary.

Waters will say anything to clear himself of the responsibility. He’s embarrassed by the album. The Floyd were in complete control of their music, and it’s a nonsense to suggest AHM was ruined in post-production or by budget limitations – neither of which applied to them.

Not familiar with Atom Heart Mother, but not sure I agree about brass always sounding hard. For me, a brass section can be one of the gentlest, most enveloping, warmest sounds. Sure, a trumpet can be quite strident but it’s also capable of tremendous warmth. The rest – French horn, trombone, tuba, whatever – all sound very calming to my ears. Hovis, and all that.

The real stab of a horn section is when you combine trumpet and sax, to my ears, and they play staccato and syncopated.

I went down to Plymouth just before last Christmas, to see my brother and his kids mostly, and to take a wander through the landscape of my childhood once again. I met him in the middle of town on a Saturday morning, we grabbed a couple of Ivor Dewdney’s finest and strolled up to the top of the town where his youngest, a cornet player, was playing classical pieces and carols with her silver band chums outside the shopping centre. She had a solo piece rehearsed, and we made sure to get there in plenty of time to catch it. I can’t remember what the piece was that she played, but it was sublime, lilting and ethereal, and I certainly remember the tears of pride and joy and wonder that ran down my cheeks as she did so.

Yes. You can’t imagine The Last Post played on anything other than bugle or trumpet. The human breathiness of the whole thing is crucial to it’s emotional power. You certainly couldn’t get the same impact on a synth.

AHM, I feel, is absolute brilliance and I love it, start to finish, even after the shoddy tape splices are pointed out. And this was why I sought out the British Sea Power album referred to, getting round to listening to it, just this week. And it is a mess, the brass and the band working against each other and swamping each other out. I recall the live reviews suggesting similar, but hoped the record might cohere. It don’t. I sensed an idea that the idea may have come from AHM, but, for me, 3/10. Binned.

I’m not a British Sea Power fan, and haven’t heard the whole album. I think the track I posted originally cropped up on one of those Spotify Discover weekly playlists. But as soon as I heard it, I became intrigued by it’s provenance, and it’s relationship with Floyd/AHM.

British Sea Power are the dullest, dreariest band I have had the misfortune to see live. They made Van Morrison seen cheerful ffs. I bought a couple of their albums before catching them live – didn’t like them either so God knows why I went to see them.
Comparing them to Floyd is surely some kind of a joke.

No. Not a joke at all. And if you’d read the whole thread, I’m a bit puzzled as to how you can draw that conclusion. Just trying to divine musical relationships and explore artistic decisions. To spell it out one last time: ‘Heavenly Waters’ sounds a bit like a brass enhanced ‘Us and Them’. I speculated that, perhaps, this is the kind of thing Floyd could have been aiming for on AHM.

Brass band on psychedelia can work as an element helping to give that slightly out of kilter, childlike, dreamworld effect which English psychedelia, at least, strived for. There’s a Pink Floyd track on Piper or maybe Saucerful I have in mind where that happens. Can’t Think of the title just now. Atom Heart Mother to my mind is moving into another style, more space rock – a term usually used for post-Syd Floyd of course. Beyond psychedelia really.

Yes, I wasn’t aiming to be too specific with my use of the term ‘psychedelia’, and would include space rock, krautrock, and maybe even some prog. When you think of that music, brass bands do not immediately spring to mind, do they? They are the wrong tools for the job.

And there’s the interesting link between Brass bands and Acid House as suggested by Jeremy Deller.
If this link works it also includes a picture of the artwork where Deller shows the fundamental connectedness of all things brass and acid. And the wonderful Williams Fairey band’s version of Guru Josh’s infinity.

Thanks for this thread – just ordered the vinly for 18.5 squid. I have my original somewhat over partied vinyl and the remastered CD but I feel the need for the real deal. Shame skinning up on the cover is now a distant memory.

Rizlas, or their cheaper equivalents, are doing very well among a lot of the young people of both sexes I see around my workplace, owing to the ubiquity of “duty free” rolling tobacco. And, er, skunk. The old business of waiting until you get home to fire one up is long gone – these days it’s anytime, anyplace, anywhere.

My very oldest friend, who was a massive smoker of weed and of cigs for about 45 years, i.e. ever since I first knew him as a 15 year old, has now given up inhaling smoke of any variety and vapes his THC these days.
I wouldn’t know where he gets it from in the UK, as I gave up cigarettes and all other drugs, except for caffeine and alcohol, about 25 years ago.

Always liked AHM, still do, messy as it is (like alll Floyd records before Obscured). The brass is just Beatley, isn’t it? Beatley brass was all over the place in the late 60s. I’m not one of those folks who goes into meltdown at the idea of something other than a guitar turning up on a rock record. A zither, a stylophone, a gospel choir, a Casio VL-Tone? Sure, throw it in, see wharrappens.

AHM is generally judged to be a failure these days but, er, it got to number one. And it was their first decent seller in America too.

Here is a perfect example of the use of a brass band in a pastoral setting.
Roy Harper’s When An Old Cricketer Leaves The Crease. It’s not psychedelia, although Roy has ingested more than his fair share of mind altering substances, but it is fantastic. Nothing hard and angular about the Grimethorpe Colliery Band here.
This is a decent home-made video too.

She may not be psychedelic but he’s definitely rather extra-terrestial.

And then there is Sigur Ros who produce epic, suggestive music that definitely is a continuation of the Floyd legacy. On their big tours there are about 20 people on stage, including the Amiina string quartet and a brass section. While I try and find something featuring brass, you can enjoy this beautifully filmed clip. Every single person in the audience is wearing a Sarah Lund Icelandic woolly.

There seems little doubt that certain types of music, or moods of music, favour certain types of instruments. Well, they do in my mind, but perhaps not everybody else’s. Even in classical music, impressionism –
which could be considered an early kind of ‘head’ music, tended to favour strings over brass.

Most of the music we like on this blog wouldn’t have happened without electronics. Guitars, synths and sequencers are the guiding tools of our modern tastes. It’s difficult to imagine ‘head’ music evolving at all without them. Although it’s interesting that early Tangerine Dream albums got by without synths, which now seems astonishing given their future trajectory. So maybe we would have had a different kind of ‘head’ music.

Still, for me, there is something about the sound of brass that roots it very much in the material world. The here and now, the slightly mundane, the everyday. All the places you don’t want to be reminded of, when you’re trying to get to inner (or outer) space.

Oh yes! I can dig a bit of Alice Coltrane and Donald Byrd and Miles. I’m also quite fond of the early Robert Wyatt albums, where the brass adds lovely accents. It’s brass en masse where the problems start.

In Bavaria, brass is the sound of the Oktoberfest and having a party. La Brass Banda are a wonderfully exhilarating live band. In return for a plane ticket and a visit to a local brewery, they managed to entice Captain Sensible over to Germany to record this magnificent reboot of Wot.

Yes, I feel this thread may have run its course. Who am I to write a prescription for head music anyway? There are plenty of times I’ve got lost in the groove of Bach or Handel, or been transported to another place by a Mozart mass. With nary a synth. in site! But I do think it’s fair to say that different instruments create different moods – for whatever reason. And to at least ask questions when certain instruments crop up in unusual, or unexpected places.

But all this brass is bringing me out in a rash, and sending me off in search of my anti-histamines.

Your mention of Bach and Handel, Martin, made me think that perhaps I have been looking in the wrong musical genres for brass with a psychedelic flavour. Modern classical music might be a better hunting ground.

Looking back at several of the songs on this thread and the use of brass, notably Roy Harper, the Unthanks, Peter Skellern, it strikes me very strongly how all of them are making use of the nostalgic, retro associations that a brass band awakens for someone from the UK. An ancient cricketer, a working man from the north of England who races pigeons, an old-fashioned romantic …..The sound of a brass band awakens memories of perhaps a concert on a bandstand in the park on a summer day. Something that belongs more to the England of John Betjeman than that of Kate Tempest.

The brass band scene is alive and well up North, most notably at the Whit Friday festival which Helen Pidd wittily describes as a “Pennine version of The Voice” due to the rather eccentric approach to judging.. Excellent article! The festival features in Brassed Off and is a major local event.